His face was
narrow and weathered and thin-cheeked, with a clean-cut jaw, small
ears, hair darker than the moustache, but touched at the side wings with
grey--the face of a man of action, self-reliant, resourceful. And his
bearing was that of one who has always been a bit of a dandy, and paid
attention to "form," yet been conscious sometimes that there were things
beyond. A man, who, preserving all the precision of a type, yet had in
him a streak of something that was not typical. Such often have tragedy
in their pasts.
Making his way towards the park, he turned into Mount Street. There was
the house still, though the street had been very different then--the
house he had passed, up and down, up and down in the fog, like a ghost,
that November afternoon, like a cast-out dog, in such awful, unutterable
agony of mind, twenty-three years ago, when Gyp was born. And then to be
told at the door--he, with no right to enter, he, loving as he believed
man never loved woman--to be told at the door that SHE was dead--dead in
bearing what he and she alone knew was their child! Up and down in the
fog, hour after hour, knowing her time was upon her; and at last to be
told that! Of all fates that befall man, surely the most awful is to
love too much.
Queer that his route should take him past the very house to-day, after
this new bereavement! Accursed luck--that gout which had sent him to
Wiesbaden, last September! Accursed luck that Gyp had ever set eyes on
this fellow Fiorsen, with his fatal fiddle! Certainly not since Gyp had
come to live with him, fifteen years ago, had he felt so forlorn and fit
for nothing.
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